Radical Changes in Marketing Industry: Consumer’s Outlook Towards Electronic Word of Mouth (e-WOM)

In the contemporary world everything has been digitalized and marketing sector has also seen
significant changes. Before buying a product, people used to consult their peers, friends, or relatives,
but this has altered now. We need not spend much time to know about the new product or brand. We
instantly get to know about the products through social media platforms, websites, search engines,
independent reviewing sites. This enables the consumer to get access to the newly introduced product
as well as already existing products by electronic word of mouth in the form of online reviews.
Therefore big salute to the internet and technology which made the things easier. Generally,
consumers have the confusions while choosing the products. Certain questions arise when they decide
to buy. The questions such as whether it is of good quality? whether the price of the product is
reasonable or whether they are paying more penny? Before making an online purchase, customers
typically read the reviews that are provided underneath the product in order to get answers to all of
these questions and also look for reviews on social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram.
Therefore this study tries to find out the consumer perception about online reviews which is considered
to be the electronic word of mouth among the consumers. This study uses a descriptive approach to
gather information from consumers by using a structured questionnaire. For the purpose of the study,
200 samples are collected from the Chennai city. The information gathered will be then analyzed to
determine the expected outcomes of the study. The findings of the study will be beneficial to the
consumers, producers, retailers and marketers.
Keywords: Online reviews, Electronic word of mouth, Social Media sites, Review sites, Video platform,
consumer perception